SUPREME COURT: HOW ABOUT SOME RELIEF?

Gov. Jerry Brown is under the gun to meet a court-ordered prison population cap by the end of the year, and he’s come up with a bevy of potentially dangerous ideas to comply with federal law, including deploying violent inmates as firefighters.

It’s all part of a plan the governor filed “under protest” late Thursday to meet a federal deadline. He concedes public safety could be undermined, and vows a new appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which already has upheld the original order.

This mess is of Brown’s own making. He should have taken lawsuits and federal court rulings, which date back years, more seriously instead of alternating between open defiance and hemming-and-hawing.

But the mandate to reduce the population in California’s 33 adult prisons to about 110,000 inmates by year’s end is unreasonable and unworkable.

So we hope the U.S. Supreme Court — for the sake of the people of California, not Jerry Brown’s — extends the Dec. 31 deadline to give the state more time to line up more jails and hire supervisory officers to deal with the newly released inmates.